Friday, September 05, 2008

Eli has added something to the blogroll, a short list of climate blogs written in other languages. The old joke is that every conference today has two official languages, English and bad English, and indeed English is today the world's lingua franca which pisses the French off no end. However, all of us who do speak English have a dream, a dream of giving a lecture in bad something or other, bad enough that you can hear the teeth in the back row grind, watch the undergrads leave, but be clear enough that the others stay and maybe even ask us what the hell we ment. Eli has done this. Revenge is VERY sweet. So if you have some other favorite climate blogs written in a language other than English, well that is what comments are for.However, there is another point to this, Georg Hoffmann's Primaklima (also blogrolled by RC) brings news of a foolish person at the University of Bayreuth who invited Ernst Georg Beck to talk. Young bunnies, you remember EG, he is the biology teacher who put together a phonebook of bad CO2 measurements, or perhaps more kindly put, good measurements done in bad locations like cities and claimed that they were representative of the global atmosphere. EG drove Georg in RC to bad puns. Anyhow, Georg has all the dirty details, but in particular, he has a letter from one of those who managed to stay to the end of Beck's talk. Eli has had fun with this as have others. Beck is so bad, he even moved

Of course I looked up Herr Beck when I received the invitation to the colloquim from one of my colleagues and for sure I inquired of him what the hell was going on.

In spite of everything it was his express desire to invite Herr Beck and I could not stop him even though we were all left shaking our heads.

In another post, Hoffmann notes that the guy who invited Beck didn't show up at the colloquim

The seminar and the discussion that followed made it very quickly clear that our fears about what he would say were sadly well taken. There was no physics in his "arguments". As in many similar cases it was not possible to move Herr Beck from his position, come what may.

Personally, I think that when we don't take down such a "seminar" then nothing further helps. Moreover, "we" can learn something from such a "seminar" because it provides rich ammunition that can be used to set the false right again.

It is my experience that people like Herr Beck or Herr Thüne unmask themselves. Whoever listens to them quickly notices after the first sentence that the talk is not about science but their own "personal problems" or "purchased opinions?

By the by:

Anyone who looks EXACTLY at Beck's measurements finds the Keeling Curve and its extension into the past (through the ice cores)is CONFIRMED exactly. Every time surface measurements were done properly since the middle of the 19th century under conditions where one would expect to observe the background atmospheric mixture (then by chance, today (Keeling) with intent) the values all matched the expected Keeling or ice core levels.

More link suggestions are welcome, even those in Strine. Read the comments below

MarkeyMouse says: For those interested in what Beck actually said: http://www.biokurs.de/treibhaus/180CO2/bayreuth/Summary-bayreuth.pdf

"Since the 19th century more than 90,000 reliable CO2 samples are available showing a systematic accuracy within ± 3 % since 1857 that had been gathered near ground, sea surface and as high as the stratosphere mostly in northern hemisphere prior to 1958 when the modern NDIR spectroscopic method had been introduced [Beck 2007].Comparison of these measurements using old wet chemical methods with the new physical method (NDIR) on sea and land reveals a systematic analysis difference of about - 10 ppm (new procedures compared to the old). Wet chemical analyses indicate three atmospheric CO2 maxima in the northern hemisphere up to approx. 400 ppm over land and sea during the past 180 years. Comparing the measured atmospheric CO2 concentration since 1920 –1950 a strong correlation of more than 80 % exists with the arctic sea surface temperature (SST).A detailed analysis of the Atlantic Ocean water during the arctic warming since 1918 to 1939 by Wattenberg (southern Atlantic ocean) and Buch (northern Atlantic ocean) indicate a very similar state of the Atlantic Ocean (pH, salinity, CO2 in water and air over sea etc.) These data show the characteristics of the warm ocean currents (part of global conveyor belt) at that time indicating a strong CO2 degassing (>360 ppm) from the Atlantic Sea especially in the area of Greenland/Island and Spitsbergen. Polyakov in 2004 had brought evidence for a decadal oscillation of the ocean currents in the arctic circle showing a warm phase (strong arctic warming during 1918 to 1940 with high temperatures in the Island/Spitsbergen area) similar than today and cold phase (around 1900 and1960) The Island/Spitsbergen area is known today for a strong absorption of CO2.This decadal heating of the oceanic CO2 absorption area and larger parts of the Northern Atlantic Ocean was followed by an increase of the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration to approx. 400 ppm during the 30s and approx. 390 ppm today. The abundance of plankton (13C) and other biota supports this view.Conclusion: Atmospheric CO2 concentration varies with climate, the sea is the dominant CO2 memory releasing the gas depending on decadal changes of temperature."

Yes, that's just how I want to spend my Sunday, reading a bunch of gibberish produced by an idiot.

It's bad enough that some people deny that there is any greenhouse effect due to the atmosphere ("it violates the second law of thermodynamics", etc), but it's just as bad (if not worse) when people deny that the recent upward trend in atmospheric CO2 is largely the result of human activities.

They have obviously never heard of isotope analysis.

In the classroom, our gracious host Eli would almost certainly nip this nonsense in the bud, but here on his blog, he is far more tolerant (a little too tolerant, in my opinion) and the nonsense from Malarkey, jae and some others gets repeated over and over and over.

It is just dumb. It's not even worth discussing. Doing so is like arguing with a two year old. You can not win.

Don't ever link stuff you don't want to link to Eli ! A real Rabett resists peer pressure. My main focus point in finding topics to post about will be the low countries anyway.

Like -and i swear to God it's a coïndence- have a closer look in detail this time at the Marcel Severijnen weblog (again). After i commented before on a post of his citing Beck, he once again uses Beck's data in a post going nowhere(in Dutch) Something which probably isn't all that interesting for the part of the world that shamefully doesn't speak Dutch. Yet.

All this actually just to say i would like to recommend some blogs too :

Rabett Run

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Eli Rabett

Eli Rabett is a not quite failed professorial techno-bunny, a chair election from retirement, at a wanna be research university that has a lot to be proud of but has swallowed the Kool-Aid. The students are naive but great and the administrators vary day-to-day between homicidal and delusional. His colleagues are smart, but they have a curious inability to see the holes that they dig for themselves. Prof. Rabett is thankful that they occasionally heed his pointing out the implications of the various enthusiasms that rattle around the department and school. Ms. Rabett is thankful that Prof. Rabett occasionally heeds her pointing out that he is nuts.